The Number on the Speedometer Was Never the Point
Ask any man who has spent a Saturday morning on a back road what made the drive memorable, and the answer rarely involves a top speed. It involves a corner taken cleanly, a downshift that landed perfectly, a stretch of pavement where everything else dropped away. Now there's data to back that instinct up. In late August, Castrol published the results of a study that hooked drivers up to brain, heart, skin and eye monitors and sent them around a track in five very different machines. The headline finding is awkward for anyone who has ever argued about horsepower figures over a beer: the true thrill of driving stems from focused, controlled immersion rather than raw speed.
The study was run with Brainbox, a UK-based neuroscience company that provides advanced brain research technology, training, and scientific support for organisations conducting research and clinical trials. Castrol has a commercial interest here, and that deserves saying up front. The company commissioned the research as part of its 'data engineered' ethos for product development, and the work ties into the marketing of its Castrol EDGE oil. Even so, the methodology is more rigorous than the usual brand-sponsored survey, and the conclusions line up with what psychologists have been saying about peak experience for decades.
How You Measure a Feeling
Car magazines, have spent generations trying to describe in words what it feels like when a car comes alive. Nobody had much luck putting a number on it. Brainbox tried to do exactly that, and the way it went about it is worth understanding, because the design is what makes the result credible.
Three Ingredients of a Thrill
The researchers broke thrill into three components that have to converge. Driving thrill comes from the convergence of three key factors in an elevated state: visceral (intense state of mental and physical stimulation), intellectual (how engaged the mind is on the given task) and emotional (identifying the balance of excitement versus fear). Think of it as a three-legged stool. A car that makes your pulse race but leaves your mind idle is a roller coaster. A task that engages your brain but doesn't stir your body is a crossword. A situation that stirs both but tips emotionally toward dread is a bad day. Real thrill needs all three at once, with excitement winning out over fear.
Dan Phillips, co-founder and director at Brainbox, put it this way: "No single measurement defines thrill, rather it is where they are heightened and converge: the individual is experiencing a state of elevated neurophysiological arousal, they perceive that they are fully in control of the vehicle, and they are immersed in the experience both cognitively and emotionally"
The Sensor Stack
Participants were wired with four separate streams of instrumentation, each aimed at a different slice of the experience:
An electroencephalography rig ran a 30-channel analysis of frontal-midline theta, a brainwave pattern associated with focused cognitive engagement. Heart rate variability monitoring tracked the balance between stress and recovery, a window into how aroused the body actually was. Galvanic skin response, which reads the skin's electrical conductivity, measured the intensity of that arousal. Eye tracking logged fixations, blink rate and saccades, the rapid jumps the eyes make between points, to determine whether a driver's arousal came from locked-in focus or from anxious, scattered scanning.
That last measurement is the clever one. A racing heart alone can't tell you whether someone is thrilled or terrified. The eyes can. A driver in a flow state fixes his gaze deliberately and moves it with purpose. A frightened one darts around, looking for something to hold onto.
The Five Tests
All testing took place at PalmerSport's facility in Bedfordshire, England. PalmerSport was founded by former English Formula 1 driver Jonathon Palmer, who competed for Tyrrell, Williams, RAM Racing, and Zakspeed between 1981 and 1989. The lineup of vehicles was deliberately varied. According to CarBuzz, it covered stints in the passenger seat of one of PalmerSport's JP-LM open-top Le Mans-style race cars, a McLaren Artura GT4, a SODI GT5 Kart, and a classic Land Rover Defender, alongside a laps session in an open racing car.
McLaren Artura GT4: The Peak
No surprise that the most expensive and capable machine in the group produced the biggest response. Participants showed the most physical and neurological arousal while piloting the McLaren Artura race car. The GT4 gives a driver a lot to chew on: braking points, steering inputs, throttle modulation, a car that rewards precision and punishes sloppiness. It is fast, but just as important, it demands the driver's full attention while remaining something an amateur can learn to manage over a few laps.
The JP-LM Passenger Ride: Fast, but Frightening
Here the study gets interesting. Participants rode as passengers in a JP-LM sports prototype piloted by a professional racer, at speeds similar to what they reached in the McLaren. The result was not thrill. Autocar reports that at similar speeds as a passenger, participants exhibited anxiety, which the researchers read as a brain becoming overwhelmed. Motor1's summary of the study notes that riding as a passenger in the JPLM produced fear signatures. Another summary of the findings noted that high-speed passenger rides scored the lowest for thrill because they induced anxiety instead.
The variable that changed between the McLaren and the prototype wasn't velocity. It was agency. In one seat, you are the one making decisions. In the other, you are cargo, strapped in next to someone whose limits are far beyond your own, with no input and no ability to anticipate what happens next.
Karts and Off-Road Crawling: Thrill at Walking Pace
The most counterintuitive results came from the slow end of the spectrum. Karting on a tight, technical circuit hit every mark. The thrill criteria were met consistently for the test subjects during the study's karting session on a tight and technical circuit, where outright speeds were modest, but where the essential visceral, intellectual and emotional thresholds for driving thrill were all met. Anyone who has stood on the brakes into a hairpin in a rental kart with their backside inches from the asphalt understands why.
Then there was the off-road session. Autocar's headline compared it to driving a McLaren, and the underlying data supports a version of that claim: thrill levels were high in the karts and in the off-road sessions, which averaged around 5 mph. Driven Car Guide notes that the off-road tests only averaged 8km/h, but asked drivers to tackle tricky climbs and wading. At that pace, a driver is studying the terrain, choosing a line, feeling for traction, and reading what the vehicle is telling him through the seat and steering wheel. The speed is trivial. The mental load is not.
What Flow State Actually Means
The study's central concept, the flow state, isn't new. The Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi popularized it in the 1990s, describing a condition of total absorption in a task where challenge and skill are closely matched. Surgeons describe it. So do rock climbers, chess players, jazz musicians and, famously, racing drivers, who often say that time seems to slow down when they're at their best.
What Castrol and Brainbox have done is attach physiological markers to the idea. Researchers said thrill was associated with participants feeling highly focused and in control within a managed environment, which is when they may enter a neurophysiological flow state. The key variables are the ones Csikszentmihalyi identified: clear goals, immediate feedback, and a challenge that stretches you without breaking you. Too easy and you're bored. Too hard and you're anxious. The sweet spot sits between.
That framing explains the passenger result neatly. In the JP-LM, the challenge was far beyond the rider's skill, and he had no way to engage with it. Anxiety followed. In the off-road Land Rover, the challenge was modest in speed but rich in problems to solve, and the driver was in charge. Flow followed.
The Industry Angle: Where Cars Are Heading
It's worth asking why a lubricant company paid for brain research. Part of the answer is marketing, and no one should pretend otherwise. But there's a broader point buried in it. The car industry is in the middle of a decade-long argument about what driving enjoyment will mean when engines are quieter, torque is instant and cars drive themselves more every year.
If thrill is a function of focus, control and feedback, not outright pace, then several things follow.
Why Horsepower Wars May Be Peaking
American buyers have lived through an extraordinary run of power. Production sedans now routinely exceed 700 horsepower, and electric models launch from rest to 60 mph in under two seconds. CarBuzz put it plainly when covering the study, saying the solution probably isn't 2.0-second 0-60 MPH times or four-figure horsepower supercars. If a driver's brain can't fully process what the car is doing, extra output doesn't add to the experience. It starts to subtract from it. Plenty of owners of very fast cars will admit privately that they rarely use more than a fraction of what the machine can do on public roads, and that the cars they actually love are slower and more communicative.
The Case for Lightweight, Communicative Cars
The findings give some scientific cover to a group of enthusiasts who have argued for years that a Mazda Miata, a Toyota GR86 or a vintage Porsche 911 is more rewarding than a car with triple the power. These cars operate in the zone where a driver can use most of the performance, receive constant feedback through the steering and chassis, and feel in command. The same goes for the Jeep Wrangler on a rock trail and the classic Defender or Bronco at a crawl.
A Warning for Driver-Assist Design
The findings also raise uncomfortable questions for automakers building increasingly automated cars. If agency is what separates thrill from fear, then systems that take control from the driver, even for good safety reasons, strip away the key ingredient. The passenger in the prototype wasn't bored. He was frightened, because he wasn't in charge. A car that drives itself puts every occupant in that passenger seat.
Caveats Worth Keeping in Mind
A fair read of this study acknowledges its limits. The sample was drawn for a single commissioned project at a single venue, and the press materials released so far do not publish participant numbers or detailed statistical analysis. Participants were likely a mix of experience levels, and a seasoned racer might well show a thrill response in the prototype passenger seat that novices did not. The study's own language is careful, describing factors that may influence the sense of thrill that drivers experience rather than proving anything definitively.
There's also the question of what the study can't measure. Sound, smell, nostalgia, the beauty of a particular car, the pleasure of a favorite road at dawn: these shape why people love driving, and none of them showed up on an EEG. The study identifies when the brain lights up. It says less about why a given car stirs the soul.
What It Means for the Modern Driver
Strip away the lab coats and the underlying message is practical and a little liberating. You don't need a seven-figure garage to feel what driving can offer. You need a setup where you are engaged, where the challenge fits your skill, and where you feel in command of the machine.
Where to Find Your Own Flow
Consider the options the study points to, most of them cheaper and more accessible than a supercar:
Karting is the obvious one. Indoor and outdoor tracks exist in nearly every major American metro area, and a season of weekend racing costs less than a set of tires for a high-performance sedan. Autocross, run in parking lots under the Sports Car Club of America banner, offers the same lesson on an even smaller budget: low speeds, tight courses, constant demands on your brain. Off-road driving, from a guided trail day in Moab to a state forest fire road in a stock SUV, forces the kind of deliberate, line-choosing focus that the Castrol data tied to elevated thrill. Track days with an instructor in the passenger seat let you build skill progressively, moving the challenge up as your ability grows.
Be the Driver, Not the Passenger
One more takeaway deserves attention. If you've ever handed the keys to a friend with a fast car and come away unsettled, you've felt the passenger effect firsthand. The study suggests that wasn't a flaw in your nerve. It was your brain reacting to a situation it couldn't influence. Ride-along experiences are fun, but if you want to understand what a car can do, take the wheel at a speed where you can think.
A Lesson as Old as the Automobile
None of this would have surprised the people who built the sport. The early Grand Prix drivers, the hill-climb specialists, the rally crews who threaded narrow mountain roads in underpowered cars: all of them understood that driving at the edge of your ability, with your full attention on the task, is the point. Colin Chapman's philosophy of adding lightness, and Enzo Ferrari's famous (if possibly apocryphal) preference for engines over aerodynamics, both belong to an era in which cars rewarded involvement above everything.
The Castrol study doesn't overturn that wisdom. It just measures it. Vincent Panel, Head of Product & Communications for Europe at Castrol, said the company wanted to develop unique insights into what the driver feels when behind the wheel: the thrill, the control, the connection. The three words he chose happen to describe the entire argument. Thrill is what you feel. Control is how you earn it. Connection is what keeps you coming back.
Next time someone asks what the fastest car you've ever driven was, you might consider answering a different question. Ask yourself instead when you felt most locked in, when the world narrowed to the next corner, the next rock, the next apex. According to the data, that's where the thrill lives, and it's probably nowhere near the redline.
